Quotes About Ecosystems

Killing off mature ecosystems results in the loss of cultural learning among the world's ecosystem communities. Or as Albert Einstein once observed, "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

The world is made up of a series of nested self-organized systems within other nested self-organized systems within other self-organized systems. They, together, make up the much larger system we know as Earth, the living, self-organized biological organism that James Lovelock named Gaia. And all of them are intelligent.

Seasonally ploughing and harvesting crops will mash up a few moles, slice through a burrow of field mice and crush any ground-nesting bird chicks. Far more significant, however, is the creation of the field in the first place: an act that replaces entire ecosystems, along with all their animal inhabitants.

The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing it's people to abject poverty.

Shrinking forests, melting ice, plowed grasslands, raging fires, drying rivers, and dying corals — diminished of all the major habitats, proxy for all who live therein, means that the numbers of free-living animals are the lowest ever, and mostly falling, across the board. It means something acutely awful, I think: that the human species has made itself incompatible with the rest of Life on Earth.

Como es lógico, existe un ritmo constante y básico de extinciones. En nuestra época, las especies se extinguen cada año a consecuencia de las actividades humanas: la urbanización, la caza, la contaminación industrial o la destrucción de los bosques tropicales.

I return to the wilderness to remember what I have forgotten, that the world can be wholesome and beautiful, that the harmony and integrity of ecosystems at peace is a mirror to what we have lost.

Throughout the living world, we find living systems nesting within other living systems.

Moreover, multiplicity, iteration, and adaptation are universal concepts in that they are apparently important attributes for agents at all levels-from chemical reactants to biological ecosystems.

If there's one thing the divas have shown it is that to indulge your passions fully is to know yourself completely. Only then can you treat the rest of the world--its people, its ecosystems, its politics-- with provocative wit and compassion.

By whatever means life first arose on Earth, evidence shows that it came early and flourished in abundance in complex ecosystems of unicellular life-forms. When it arrived, it began to play a critical role in preparing Earth for more life, for all Earth's future inhabitants. The next chapter explains some of the ways it served later life's needs.

The byproduct of the main thrust to protect the biodiversity of a given place is that you get especially young people out to the parks, because it will be future generations that will have to value these landscapes and these ecosystems and make sure that nobody is changing the law.

The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument may be distant from our shores, but it will help us understand how healthy marine ecosystems work and how we can revive troubled seas closer to home.

The truth is, natural organisms have managed to do everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet or mortgaging the future.

The degradation of natural resources such as forests and freshwater has removed much of the resilience that societies formerly enjoyed.

The World Bank also warned when it released its report that "we're on track for a 4°C warmer world [by century's end] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.

It's the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change - as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

As species are exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species.

The destruction of the natural beauty, the ecosystems, and the majesty of mountains affect us in ways we're not even aware of. Every time a mountain is beheaded, we chop off a little part of our souls.

Under this system, nonliving things, such as industries and products, are often valued more than living organisms, such as ecosystems and basic human health. The development of industry and commerce at the cost of life has crippled humankind, without exception to one's place in the social hierarchy.

Farmers grab a few harvests, but the soil is not bared to rain and sun long enough to incur permanent damage. Switching from field to field to field, swidden farmers live in the forest without destroying the ecosystems they depend on: a supple, balanced harmony.

Rocketing up the growth curve, humankind every year takes ever more of the earth's richness. An often quoted estimate by a team of Stanford biologists is that humans grab "about 40% of the present net primary production in terrestrial ecosystems"—40 percent of the entire world's output of land plants and animals.

After 1492 the world's ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.

Different types of disturbance shape different ecosystems: floods in the Nile, landslides on the steep pitches of the Andes, hurricanes in the Yucatán Peninsula. For more than ten thousand years, most North American ecosystems have been dominated by fire.